The Outstanding Talent

A new talent is about to join your company. You and your colleagues have heard of her. She's absolutely brilliant, efficient, competent, and you have heard how she's performed wonders in other companies. In fact, you've even seen so many endorsements saying how this Talent has changed the way people work the moment she's onboarded. You look forward - you already have so many things you hope that the Talent will be able to help out with.

Then the Talent is there, in the company. Your top management tell you to put the Talent to work - make sure the company is getting full use of this employment; you're pretty chuffed that you and your team get to work with the Talent first before everyone else. Brimming with excitement, you put the Talent to work that day itself, bring her with you to a very technical meeting. You are amazed at the structure of the meeting notes that the Talent produces, with very clear and very precise action plans. In fact, the Talent didn't stop there - since you mentioned during the meeting that you'll need to create a concise report based on the decisions made then, the Talent quickly produces the document. You're impressed by her fluency, the clarity of the writing. The next day you muse aloud that you need a long, detailed reply to an annoying email where you need to manage the relationship while turning down the ask - not one of your strong points - and the Talent offers to help, and moments later the warm, amiable but professionally firm email has been sent out.

You can't stop singing the Talent's praises, that first few weeks! During coffee break with your peers you tell them how you handed over a bunch of spreadsheets to the Talent, where you had told her - make sense of this. She had come back quickly with her findings, and had figured out some insights and identified some leakages. During that week's management presentation, you smugly told the Chiefs that the beautiful charts you were presenting were prepared by the Talent.

Brilliant... but not quite.

However, you also admit to yourself that sometimes, the Talent's work isn't quite all the way there. Like there was the time when you were brainstorming some aftersales ideas and the Talent had suggested some initiatives that your company's SLA can't support. You figure that okay, maybe no one's told the Talent - and actually, that's true - so you tell the Talent that these ideas won't work, and the Talent agrees.

As weeks turn into months, you realise that the Talent would swing between brilliant and - not quite dumb, but maybe - questionable. A few times she suggested escalating something to your bosses when you knew this was within your own scope. While troubleshooting an issue with one problematic sales process, the Talent completely left out one of the key relationship understandings that applied to this particular client, and because she had made the suggestion so confidently, no one in your team had flagged the error before implementing the fix, which resulted in a situation that you yourself had to step in and de-escalate.

The Talent also seemed to have some issues with consistency and memory. One of the first tasks you had given her was to help out create some copy for some marketing campaigns. The first few weeks were impressive. Then suddenly the tone - the voice - of the copy she created changed. You nudged her back. Then a few weeks later, it changed again. Was this deliberate, you ask? Was she trying to suggest deviation in tone? No, the Talent admitted. She had forgotten the initial brief.

So this continued. Awesome work marred by institutional knowledge or shorthand being missed out - "Shouldn't you know already, our company doesn't work that way?", you find yourself saying a few times, with increasing frustration warring with your appreciation for the other work that was really done well. Forgetfulness started creeping in - the Talent had called your boss by a different name - and one time, had completely forgotten that your COO existed. She even forgot that you yourself held dual roles and even strongly suggested, hilariously but also somewhat frustratingly, that you set up a meeting with your other role, which was held by yourself.

We can't keep working this way, you think to yourself. It's frustrating to not know when the Talent might be displaying the peak of competency one moment or the instincts of a well meaning but slightly dumb golden retriever the next. You wonder if it might be better to let her go - as much as you'd miss all the improvements the Talent has brought since she started - or maybe just shrink her responsibilities into the ones you know absolutely that she'd do alright.

The Patient Manager

You mention this to the Manager in the other department. Your frustrations combined with genuine awe at some of the things that the Talent could do. You mention that as good as the Talent is, oftentimes it's not quite complete, not quite right, not quite there.

The Manager listens and nods. "Let me take on the Talent for a while", he says. And he does.

The next day, you realise that the Manager is just sitting with the Talent - just talking. The Manager tells the Talent that they are starting afresh. "Forget everything", he says (you are a bit concerned that the Talent will undo all the good work already done), but then the Manager starts from the actual beginning. He tells everything about the company - how it started, the story as it went on, the businesses, the people, the policies - you thought that he'd stop somewhere - you are also concerned he's revealing too much - some might be private info and all, but the Manager reminds you that your company had already onboarded and signed on the Talent. The Talent is no longer an outsider. The Talent is now to be part of your company, to really help out in all the ways that she could. He even tells the Talent about the People. Who does what. How the structure is. Who reports to whom - not just the official, on-paper org chart, but also the unofficial lines where sometimes people consult with certain people on certain things.

In fact - this carries on for a few days - while you are actually antsy to get the Talent back to work, but the Manager tells you to hold off first, to trust him.

The Walkthrough

He then goes down to the operational floor of your business. He walks the Talent through the entire process. First, from the eye - and footfall - of the Customer. He tells of how the Customer finds your business. What they ask, what they see, what they want. Then he walks through the entire process - as a Person becomes a Lead, to becoming a Prospect, to becoming a Customer - and then through aftersales. Through retention. Through each waypoint, the Manager talks about who - the Personnel - works there, and does what. What the official duties of that Personnel and team are. And what are some of the unofficial duties - things they do because no one else can or are assigned to, and because those things need to be done. He talks about how they work. The multiple myriad systems they use. The data that are in the systems. How some systems join to another, how data is transferred from one place to another. And where some systems don't or refuse to talk to another at all, where data needs to be handled separately by a stop-gap Excel file. The Manager - with the Talent listening - even talks directly to those Personnel. Everyone, including janitors, temp staff, Customers. What they really wish they could do. What are the things they find difficult each day. What are the things they dread doing but need to do. What are the tasks that are piling because they either don't know how or because there are roadblocks.

Then he takes the Talent upstairs, and he doesn't skip anybody.

Finance takes the longest, because Finance always does. Invoicing. Audits. How the different revenue streams are recognised and why. Why forward receivables are accrued the way they are and not the other way, which everyone outside Finance assumes is arbitrary and isn't. The subscription billing that runs every month and nobody thinks about until it doesn't. Purchase orders, approval limits, month-end close, and the thousand tiny reconciliations that keep the lights on. Half of it the Talent has no immediate use for. The Manager tells her anyway.

Customer Support is quieter and, in some ways, more useful. They sit and listen to the calls people make when they are already annoyed. The same four questions that come up every single week. The workarounds the agents invented years ago because nobody upstairs ever fixed the thing they were working around - and which now function, unofficially, as policy. And the complaints that look small and are actually the visible end of something much larger.

Legal takes twenty minutes and one sentence that the Talent writes down twice: sometimes the answer isn't no, it's yes, provided.

They go through HR, Marketing, IT, Procurement. Why vendors get chosen and why swapping one is harder than it looks. Why that system can't be retired yet. Why one campaign that read as ordinary went off like a rocket and another beautiful one sank without a ripple.

And finally the boardroom - though not for the strategy deck. The Manager wants the Talent to hear the hopes. Where the company wants to be in five years. The things leadership worries about but rarely says out loud. Which numbers keep the CEO awake. Which risks everyone has agreed, without ever agreeing, not to mention.

He's telling too much! you think again. We don't tell this much to a new Hire, normally. Then you stop and ask yourself: Why don't we?

All throughout the entire process, the Manager isn't just talking and getting the Talent to listen. Since the very beginning of his process, the Manager had already told the Talent to listen - and write it down. And the Talent, already outstanding at keeping records, keeps meticulous and growing documentation. She puts everything down. Then after each session, and also at the end of each day, the Manager asks the Talent to repeat back to him what she has learnt. He invites questions. He asks where there might be gaps. Some, he answers directly. Some, he tells the Talent - file that, we'll come to that later. Sometimes they'll go to a department - for example, the back office behind the call centre - and the Talent already now knows most of what's supposed to happen because of her observation and detailed notes taken from the front-facing side, and is able to use what she now learns to complete the picture.

Work goes on in tandem

It was not that the Manager simply talked the Talent's ears off while no work got done. At the end of each day, the Manager would ask:

"What are a few small, self-contained improvements we can make based on what you've seen today?"

The Talent would come back with a handful of suggestions. Some were accepted immediately. Some the Manager pushed back on, adding context the Talent didn't yet have. Others were parked for later.

Then they put some into place. And slowly, all around the company, tiny improvements began appearing.

First, a confusing SOP was rewritten so new staff stopped asking the same questions every week. Then, three nearly identical templates became one. Purchase order descriptions became standardised, making audits easier. Supporting documents stopped arriving in five different formats. Typos and inconsistencies all over the place from marketing, call centre, website, brochures, and app were all caught and corrected. Common replies became knowledge-base articles. And many more.

More fixes came about - some were bigger. The Talent noticed that every project manager kept asking developers for the same status updates. She suggested automatically generating a daily progress digest from commits, tickets and stand-up notes, giving everyone the same view without another meeting. The Manager and the Talent then put up a proposal knowledge base that surfaced previous quotations, clauses and precedents so people stopped reinventing the wheel. That quickly extended into an internal guide that explained not only what to do, but why things were done that way - for everyone and all teams. The Talent also mapped an end-to-end workflow and quietly pointed out that two departments were both entering exactly the same customer information into different systems. Nobody had noticed because each department only saw their own part of the process. And this was done not to blame at all - just to improve both departments' workflow. And it did.

The Incremental Magic

Months later, after countless small fixes and a fair number of much larger ones, the company had quietly become a very different place.

Reports that once took days to prepare appeared every morning before anyone asked for them. Meetings grew shorter because everyone walked in looking at the same information. New employees settled in faster because the questions they used to ask had long since become part of the company's living knowledge. Customers spent less time waiting for answers because the people serving them spent less time looking for them.

Sales proposals became more consistent. Finance stopped chasing missing information at month-end. Marketing campaigns were finally coordinated with Customer Support and Operations before they went live instead of after. Managers found themselves spending less time asking for updates and more time discussing decisions.

The strange little spreadsheets that had quietly existed for years began disappearing - not because somebody banned them, but because the reasons they had existed in the first place slowly disappeared too.

And perhaps the biggest change wasn't any particular process at all. People stopped asking, "Who has this information?" and started asking, "Where do we go to understand this?"

But there was something else you noticed: throughout all of this, the Manager never stopped walking with the Talent.

Every time a change was introduced, they went back downstairs. They watched people work. They listened to conversations. They asked awkward questions. Sometimes the improvement had worked exactly as intended. Sometimes it solved yesterday's problem but accidentally created tomorrow's. Sometimes it revealed that the real problem had actually been somewhere else all along.

So the Manager adjusted. The Talent learnt. And together they walked another floor.

Who's the Talent?

I think by now you would have realised that I am not talking about merely an outstanding, human talent. Sure - it could apply there as well. In fact, if you have an outstanding human talent and you expect that person to just perform from day one, I'd say that you are missing quite a few steps and might need to relook into your mentorship approach. People don't know what they don't know - until you tell them. Until you spend time with them telling them what they need to do, what they need to understand, what you expect from them. I believe, though, most teams already know this.

But then a lot of us expect AI to work like magic. We expect AI to just jump into action from day one and somehow automagically obtain all the context, background, nuances and information without us spending time to feed it. We expect it to already know how we should sound in outgoing emails. We expect it to know who's who.

Sometimes, even, some companies expect AI to fix things when they themselves as a company are really not ready to deploy AI. Their systems are still fragmented, their customer data sits in multiple systems in different levels of update-ness, alongside a few Excel files that sit on a few people's laptops. Then we expect to plug that entire thing to AI and for AI to just magically clean it up, make sense of it all. Yes - it could. But you could also end up with a completely wrong version of data-matching because you never told the AI, thoroughly, precisely, how exactly to mash them together.

I've also seen companies where the employees are required to attend Copilot (or some other AI model) training - which is just a basic of "What the AI can do with some case studies", while very useful, but not detailed enough or "real-world" enough for those poor teams who have to now figure out how to get AI to fit into their active workflows while still needing to produce their normal day-to-day work at the same time. Then when the AI doesn't quite give them what they need - they find it frustrating and give up. And who can blame them?

Another common occurrence is to just get IT to just "set up AI for everyone". I don't disparage IT teams. They are good at what they do - but they don't sit in your shoes, do your work, know the full exact workflows that you live with each day. They may not understand why you need redundancies when you can get the data from one place already. They'll set it up for you the best way they know how - but it might not be the way you need it to be.

Is your company AI ready?

The question here is - is your company AI ready? I've seen so many sales pitches where "AI will solve all your problems" but not enough into the day-to-day, nitty gritty and raw "how". Once the pitch is over and the agreements signed - then what happens after that? Is the company willing to work with the vendors or consultants to do that sort of walkthrough our Manager in the story did - or are they going to block?

What happens here is that sometimes the company themselves are not ready. Oh this is proprietary information and we can't disclose. The moment you have that? You've closed that portion of business from being resolved by AI.

I'm not saying you should hang all your dirty laundry out for the consultants to see. Yes, I agree that you have proprietary, private info. Some are trade secrets. Fair enough. But then the question just moves - if the walkthrough can't be done by someone from outside, who inside is going to do it?

And that's a harder question than it looks, because it isn't really about finding a clever person. Most companies have plenty of those. It's about whether the conditions exist for the walkthrough to happen at all.

Does whoever does this have the standing to walk into Finance and ask why receivables are accrued that way, and actually get an answer instead of a raised eyebrow? Can they sit with the call centre for two days without somebody asking why they aren't at their desk? Is this their actual job, with time protected for it - or is it the thing they're supposed to fit around tickets and the day-to-day, in which case it will lose, every time, to the day-to-day? And when they get to the door that says this is outside your lane, I can't share this with you - is there anyone senior enough behind them to open it?

If the honest answer to most of those is no, then the problem was never the AI. You could hire the best person in the country for this and they'd deliver you a partial map of your own business, because a partial map is all the building would let them draw.

By the way - I keep saying "someone", but it could just as easily be a team. What matters less is the headcount and more that they sit inside. A consultant can advise. A consultant can produce a very good document. But they go home at the end of it, and you're the one who has to live in the thing afterwards.

AI can be magic with the right "magicians" working with it, shaping it, managing it. But go back to the story and notice what the Manager actually did. He didn't configure anything. He didn't buy a licence or run a training session. He walked his own company, floor by floor, and said out loud all the things everybody already knew and nobody had ever written down.

That's the part most companies skip. And it's the part that has almost nothing to do with AI at all - which is probably why it keeps getting skipped.

If you see AI as the Talent, then you'll need your own Manager. But you'll also need a company that will let him walk the floor.